


Your Listed Heart

by Willowe



Series: Romance is Boring [6]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alcohol Use and Sobriety: See Author's Note, Coming Out, Communication Failure, Gen, Hopeful Ending, Internalized Arophobia, Mentions of Clint/Bobbi, arophobia, grey-aromantic!Clint, mentions of Tony/Pepper/Rhodey, mentions of past Clint/Natasha
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-01
Updated: 2017-12-04
Packaged: 2019-02-09 00:09:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 18,439
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12876006
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Willowe/pseuds/Willowe
Summary: Bobbi Morse breaks up with Clint Barton almost exactly six months after their first date, and everything goes to pieces.Romance, relationships, identities- he doesn't want to think about any of that. But one drunken night, and one drunken mistake, later and Clint finds himself having to confront something much worse: the person at the heart of it all.One Natasha Romanov.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Well I said this would be posted by "the end of summer" but that's basically the same as the end of the year, right? Thank you all for you patience with me while I worked on this fic. It took a couple of unexpected turns but I hope it's worth the wait!
> 
> Title from the song "There Are Listed Buildings" by Los Campesinos!
> 
> Also, if you haven't checked it out yet head over to the [Romance is Boring FAQ Page](http://willowenigma.tumblr.com/romanceisboring)! There's a lot of content there, including some unpublished ficlets, graphics, and a playlist for the series!
> 
>  **Additional notes and warnings:** There is a minor side-plot involving Tony attempting to be sober and Clint, who is drunk at the time, lightly goading him to drink. Tony doesn't, but please read with caution if this is a sensitive topic for you.

Everything finally comes to a head on a hot, August day. Outside the temperatures are climbing up into the 90s, but Tony isn’t stupid enough to venture outside in New York in the middle of summer. He’s been spending a lazy day on the couch down on the communal floor, no Stark Industries meetings or work projects to worry about, just a few bits of code to mess around with for fun. Pepper is out with Holly for the day and Tony has a half-formed plan of giving the newest armor prototype a test flight later, but for now he’s content to stay here with the team wandering through as they please. 

Most of the others don’t stick around; they’ll say hello to Tony, maybe draw him into a quick conversation, and then leave to continue with their own plans for the day. Tony is fine with that- he does enjoy having some time to himself, after all- but he also doesn’t mind when Natasha shows up and camps out in the living room with him. She’s been a bit cagier lately, ever since her well-intentioned questions triggered an identity crisis for Tony back in May. He doesn’t hold it against her but in some ways the two of them are too similar and he knows that Natasha is less quick to forgive herself. Even if it has been well over two months by this point. 

So when she walks in, book in hand, and nudges one of Tony’s legs he doesn’t hesitate to sit up and make room for her on the couch, even as he complains, “You couldn’t have taken one of the chairs?”

“The couch is more comfortable,” Natasha replies. She stretches out, a little tentatively, and Tony is quick to adjust and give her room.

“I know, that’s why I was over here first,” Tony grumbles. The look Natasha gives him makes it clear that she sees through his faux-annoyance and he drops the charade to grin at her instead. She sighs, but gives him a wry smile in response, and Tony is hopeful that she’s finally, _finally_ stopped kicking herself over what happened back in May. 

And then Barton shows up. 

Natasha has to hear him first because she tenses suddenly and mutters, “ _Shit_ ,” under her breath. She’s already setting her book aside and standing up by the time Tony hears the sound of someone stumbling, very loudly, down the hall towards the communal living room. He doesn’t know what’s happening at first and he’s half-ready to call for the armor when Barton staggers into the room. He has a conspicuous brown-bagged bottle in his hand that’s clearly been open, although Tony doesn’t know when Barton broke into the booze.

A drunk Clint Barton, this early in the day, is never a good sign, but a drunk Clint Barton being confronted by Natasha Romanov is bound to be a disaster. Tony doesn’t know what the issue between them is, not yet, but he’s picked up on the growing tension between them over the last few months- and there’s no missing the fact that the casual stance Clint takes when he sees her is a little _too_ casual to be genuine. 

“Oh, look, the whole fucking peanut gallery is here, how awesome is that?” Clint says sarcastically, already moving towards the kitchen. 

Natasha gives Tony a look but he just shrugs. How the hell is he supposed to know what’s going on with Clint, especially if she doesn’t? Whatever their current problems are there’s still no one in the Tower who knows the archer better than Natasha.

“Don’t drag me into this, I was here before you walked in,” Tony says. He turns back to his tablet but keeps one eye on the situation as Natasha follows Clint into the kitchen.

“Just getting food, then I’ll get out of your hair, Stark,” Clint calls back. His voice isn’t as slurred as Tony would expect, given how he’s swaying on his feet, but that’s explained when Clint continues with, “I just walked here from fucking Bed-Stuy, I’m starved.”

Just tired then. Tired, and probably started drinking when he hit the lobby. Clint’s an idiot but even he usually isn’t stupid enough to be drinking on the street in the middle of Manhattan in broad daylight. Still that doesn’t explain why Clint hoofed it to the Tower from Brooklyn in the first place and Tony doesn’t hesitate to ask, “Yeah, and why exactly did you think that would be a good idea?”

“Didn’t have any other choice,” is Clint’s only response. 

Tony rolls his eyes, a little annoyed but also not surprised by Clint’s caginess considering the mood he’s obviously in. “Fine, keep your secrets, if that’ll make you feel better,” Tony replies and flips through some more of the code on his tablet screen. Whatever is going on here clearly isn’t his problem, especially not with Natasha’s eventual involvement practically inevitable. 

Sure enough, the next thing Tony hears is Natasha asking, “Weren’t you supposed to be spending today with Bobbi?”

Tony is glad that the couch hides most of his expressions and movements because he immediately winces at Natasha’s tone. Shit, if Clint was supposed to be spending the day with his girlfriend only to show up at the Tower halfway to drunk…

“Clint,” Natasha sighs. “What did you do this time?”

“Oh, right, because it’s always my fault when shit goes sideways,” Clint snaps. There’s the sound of a dish clattering on the counter. Tony has to push back the urge to make a quip about protecting the china because he doesn’t give two fucks about the plates, not really, but he is very invested in the storm brewing in the kitchen at the moment. 

“So things did go to shit then.” There’s a moment of pointed silence from Clint before Natasha sighs again, a little huff of annoyance, and says, “Bobbi broke up with you, didn’t she?”

How Natasha deduced that from what little information Clint shared so far, Tony has no idea. Must be the weird assassin brain-share that the two of them have going on, though judging by they way Clint is muttering curses under his breath the archer isn’t thrilled that Nat figured things out. 

“Apparently I was, quote, _trying too hard in all the wrong ways_ , unquote, which is a new one for me, isn’t it?” Clint says with a forced cheer that sets even Tony’s teeth on edge to hear. “I think six months is a new relationship record too, so all in all I don’t think I did too badly this time-”

“Clint.”

“What do you want me to say, Nat? I’ve been through this with Bobbi once today and I’m not in the mood to rehash it with you,” Clint says. There’s a few beeps from the microwave and then the low hum as Clint reheats whatever food he grabbed. 

“Rehashing the situation is how we usually stop this from happening again,” Natasha says. 

Tony frowns down at his tablet screen. There’s something off about she phrased that, like Clint’s relationship is a joint op that they need to debrief on, even though Natasha hadn’t been a part of the relationship at all.

Clint doesn’t seem to share Tony’s confusion, but there is vitriol in his voice when he says, “Yeah, but rehashing things with you hasn’t done me too much good so far, has it?”

“It’s stopped you from accidentally cheating on your girlfriends again,” Natasha snaps back.

Part of Tony wants to speak up and ask if they even remember that he’s here, because he’s pretty sure this is a conversation that he’s not supposed to be privy to. Part of him wants to ask how you _accidentally_ cheat on a partner (although he has no doubt that Clint did, in fact, somehow manage to do just that). Mostly though Tony wants to stay quiet and keep eavesdropping, to try and figure out the source of whatever weirdness has been creeping up between the two ex-SHIELD agents lately. 

“Can it, Nat.” The microwave beeps and Tony can smell Clint’s food when the archer takes it out. “I just want to get something to eat and spend the rest of the night drinking my sorrows away.”

“Not down here-”

“Yeah, I know not down here, I didn’t fucking forget Stark’s sobriety attempt, thank you very much!” Clint interrupts.

“Well that phrasing stings a little,” Tony calls out, because _that_ one he isn’t going to let slide. He’s going on a week without drinking, and although it’s not his longest sobriety streak- three months in a cave still has that one beat- he is a little proud of himself nonetheless. 

One of the many silver linings from his crisis back in May, apart from the obvious advantages to his relationship with Pepper and Rhodey, is that Tony realized that he can’t keep drinking his problems away. If Steve hadn’t showed up to talk sense into him that night in his workshop, Tony has no doubt that he would have let his relationship fall apart in a fit of drunken despair. The idea is enough to scare him into at least _trying_ to stay sober, even if there are some days that Tony thinks he’ll go crazy without a drink. He’s not naive enough to think that his relationship alone will be enough to get him to stop drinking, because god knows Tony isn’t living in a Lifetime movie, but he’s hoping the drunken memory of genuinely expecting his relationship to end will be enough to keep him moving forward anyway.

Tony doesn’t particularly care what the rest of his teammates do, or drink, as long as they stop involving him in it. But Natasha seems to have a different opinion and she’s quick to say, “You shouldn’t drink at all, Clint, that’s not going to solve anything-”

“There’s nothing to fucking solve!” Clint cuts in. “Or did you miss the part where I got fucking dumped today?” The sound of the microwave slamming shut echoes loudly across the communal floor and then Clint says, “Get the fuck out of my way, Nat.”

“At the very least, I don’t think you should be drinking alone right now,” Natasha says, her voice quieter than Clint’s but edged with steel. 

Tony tenses on the couch and lowers his tablet, listening to see if a physical fight is going to break out between the two assassins. Tony doubts he would be able to do much to stop the two of them, but if needed JARVIS can raise an alarm and Steve or Thor would be able to put an end to any fight that got started. 

Clint laughs, the sound loud and harsh in the tense stillness of the room. “Yeah, well, I’m not fucking drinking with you so get out of my way.”

Tony slowly, carefully, turns to look over the back of the couch again to get a better idea of the situation. For a moment it doesn’t look like Natasha is going to move and Tony starts to wonder if he should be calling for backup now before a fight actually breaks out, especially when Clint takes an aggressive step forward. But Natasha, it seems, doesn’t want to actually provoke him and she sweeps to the side just before Clint’s plate of food can jab her in the chest. Clint storms out of the room, nearly clipping the edge of the doorway, and Tony watches as Natasha signs something rude at his retreating back.

“Well then,” Tony says to break the growing silence, when it’s obvious that Natasha has no intention of speaking or even moving any time soon. “Do Barton’s break-ups always go like this?”

“Not quite,” Natasha says. The casual tone from earlier is gone, replaced with clipped vowels and an unreadable face, and Tony has to resist the urge to roll his eyes. Fucking super-spies, always making shit more difficult than it needs to be.

“How do they usually go then?” Tony prompts, because that’s a question that he doesn’t already have an answer to. Bobbi Morse was Clint’s first attempt at dating since the Avengers came together- understandable, given Loki and the fall of SHIELD and everything else that’s happened in the last three years. But that just means that Tony is working with no data and while there are plenty of theories bouncing around his head- have been, for several months in fact, and all of them are circling closer to that shiny green _aromantic_ label- he needs actual information in order to confirm or deny anything.

“Clint fucks up, and I tell him how to not do it again,” Natasha says, her words curt. 

Tony has so many questions about that, so many things he wants to ask, but he settles for, “And how did that particular routine begin?”

Finally Natasha’s mask cracks a little and she exhales, loud enough to almost be called a sigh, and turns to actually face Tony. “Clint’s always been bad at relationships,” Natasha explains. “Bad in ways that I didn’t even know it was possible to be bad.”

“Like accidentally cheating on his girlfriend,” Tony cuts in because, yeah, he hadn’t forgotten that one.

“Exactly,” Natasha says. “It’s like… he gets into a relationship and forgets how to read people entirely. He always does too much, or not enough, or seemingly just forgets that he’s in a relationship altogether. It’s infuriating to watch so I started offering him advice, which helps a little until he goes and finds some new way of messing things up.”

Tony frowns. Clint can be a bit of an idiot, sure, but it’s usually about dumb things. Making a bad call and refusing to admit he was wrong, or forgetting that he was meeting someone, or just acting like an idiot to get a reaction from someone. Misreading people and situations has never been a flaw for the ex-SHIELD agent, and even if Tony knows that relationships aren’t like covert ops it’s hard to picture Clint floundering that much when he dates someone. 

Unless… “You sure the problem isn’t just that Clint’s not entirely alloromantic?” Tony asks, making sure to keep his tone light. He hasn’t talked about aromantic identities with Natasha since shit went sideways back in May, and he doesn’t need to fuel another one of her guilt-trips.

“Clint would have said something after you came out if that was the case,” Natasha says. 

Tony has to tread lightly here, he knows that. “He doesn’t seem to have been very… comfortable.... around you lately though,” he says, choosing his words with care and caution.

“He would have said something to me,” Natasha says, with the sort of firm conviction that only comes from a friendship where your life has literally been in the other person’s hands. 

Except Tony has those friendships too, has had his literal heart in his friends-turned-partners’ hands, and he knows all too well how unnervingly easy it can be to keep secrets from the people who mean the world to you. “Maybe,” Tony says, noncommittal, because regardless of whether Clint would have said talked to Natasha or not the fact remains that there’s little _Tony_ can do in this situation. 

If Clint is on the aromantic spectrum- and right now that’s still a pretty big _if_ \- Natasha isn’t the person that Tony should be discussing that with. But it’s not like he can talk about it with Clint, definitely not while the guy is drinking and honestly, he’s not sure Clint would want to listen to him even while sober. 

Maybe he should get Pepper to talk to Barton instead. She, at least, has practice with those kinds of conversations. Tony’s pretty sure if he tried he would just make a mess of things. 

Natasha doesn’t stick around the communal areas long after that, and Tony is disappointed but can’t really blame her. She’s rattled by the encounter with Clint, not that she would ever admit to it. Tony hopes that whatever is going on between them gets sorted soon, for both their sakes. And for his, if he’s being honest, because while Tony would hardly consider his afternoon “ruined” by this encounter there’s an unease that he can’t shake and he vacates the living room soon after Natasha leaves.

At least he still has armor test flights to help clear his head. And if Tony maybe pops down to D.C. to catch a late dinner with Rhodey, back on the east coast only for the evening, well, who can blame him for that? (Even if Rhodey is less-than-thrilled when he learns that Tony took an experimental armor out for such a long test flight.)

One of the repulsor boots goes on the fritz when he’s twenty minutes away from New York and as he makes a delicately landing he has to concede that, maybe, Rhodey was right about keeping his test flights limited to local airspace only. Still he has plenty of information about the new armor and once he’s back in the workshop he has JARVIS start running equations while he digs into the wiring in the faulty repulsor boot.

Tony never intends to lose track of time in the workshop, but sometimes he can’t help it. Sometimes the overload of projects makes it impossible to leave, like what happened at the beginning of the year. Other times, like now, Tony just gets wrapped up in the joy of solving a new engineering puzzle. He already rebuilt the older versions of the armor that had been destroyed back when he was too busy to keep up with repairs, so it’s not like there’s a time crunch to get this new one built. No, for once Tony gets to work on the Iron Man armor purely for _fun_.

“Sir, Agent Barton is on his way down to the workshop,” JARVIS says when Tony nearly has the power issue sorted out.

Well, the night had been enjoyable for a little while at least. “Let me guess, he’s coming down to drunkenly give me suggestions for arrows again?” Tony asks, mostly rhetorical. “I don’t care what he says I’m not helping him build another boomerang arrow.” Not that building arrows that somehow break the laws of physics isn’t fun, but depending on how drunk Barton is by now this could just be an exercise in cajoling him back upstairs to sleep.

“I do not think Agent Barton is planning on discussing weaponry,” JARVIS says. “He appears to be… distressed.”

That gives Tony pause. “Distressed?” he repeats. “What do you mean, distressed?”

“He is rather drunk, and rather emotional,” JARVIS says, as if that’s any kind of explanation. 

“Emotional,” Tony echoes again. “JARVIS you’ve gotta help me out a little here, what do you mean-?”

And that’s as far as Tony gets before the door to the workshop opens- because Tony hadn’t thought to put any lockdown protocols in effect, why would he on an otherwise _normal night_ \- and Barton comes stumbling into the workshop.

“You!” Clint shouts, and almost fall over when he tries to point at Tony. 

You, tucked away in his charging station, perks up almost inquisitively, no doubt wondering if maybe the archer had been talking about him instead. Tony has to quickly shoo the bot back when You starts rolling forward. The last thing Tony needs is for the bots to start interfering with what looks to be a delicate situation. 

“Me,” Tony calls back to Clint. “What are you doing down here, Barton?”

“Looking for you,” Clint replies as he slowly weaves between projects and workbenches, moving closer to where Tony is standing. 

“Yeah, I got that part, but- Christ, Barton, be careful!” Tony snaps as Clint nearly knocks a delicate prototype onto the floor. “You are definitely way too fucking drunk to be here right now!”

“Yeah, well, ‘s your fault,” Clint replies. He knocks into a workbench and seems content to stay there, clinging to the edge to keep himself upright. 

Tony sighs and has to resist the urge to pinch the bridge of his nose. “Oh my god, you’re a disaster,” he mutters under his breath. Still, Tony grabs two stools and drags them over to Clint, gently pushing the archer down onto one and taking the other himself. “What, exactly, do you think is my fault here? Because the drinking is all on you, buddy.”

“No, the drinking is on _you-u_ ,” Clint says, almost in a sing-song. He sighs and rests his head on top of his arms on the workbench, muffling his voice as he continues, “Tha’s what I was comin’ down here to yell at you about. ‘s your fault.”

“Thought you were drinking because Bobbi broke up with you today,” Tony says. He’s still confused about what Clint is doing down here, and has absolutely no idea why Barton thinks he’s to blame for anything, but maybe this is the chance Tony needs to pry some answers out of his teammate.

Tony immediately feels guilty at that thought. He knows, all too well, what it's like to pass out drunk and wake up with your secrets known to the world. He also knows what it's like when that betrayal comes from someone you thought you could trust, and even if Tony isn't planning on sharing anything that Clint says with the other Avengers... well, that barely excuses what he's about to do. 

But if Clint isn't talking to Natasha- and Tony has no doubt that he's not talking to Nat at the moment- then Clint probably isn't talking to anyone, which definitely isn't a good thing. Left to his own devices, Clint will bottle everything up and let it fester until something finally has to give. Tony, for one, would rather address the current situation before something sets the archer off and he makes things more difficult than they need to be. 

Clint, still with his head resting on his arms, manages to wiggle one hand out to wave vaguely in Tony's direction. "That too," he mumbles. "There's a lot of reasons to drink today."

That's a sentiment that Tony knows all too well. "And one of those reasons is me," Tony repeats. "Is one of those reasons also Natasha?" Because after witnessing their conversation earlier he very strongly suspects that Natasha is at the heart of whatever is going on with Barton's romantic issues, whether she knows it or not.

"That," Clint says, surprisingly firm for someone as drunk as he is, "we're not gonna talk about."

"Well then what are we going to talk about?" Tony presses, because he's willing to let the Natasha subject drop. For now, at least. "Because you came down here for something, bird boy, but so far you've been surprisingly tight-lipped about it all. I'm pretty sure the alcohol is supposed to loosen tongues, not make you even more cryptic than usual."

"Fuck off, Stark." It's Clint's usual reply when Tony is being irritating, and it stopped carrying any real heat behind it years ago. What does sting is Clint's next remark, a callous, "You should dig out that bottle I know you still have stashed down here and drink with me, maybe get on my level if you want me to talk.”

Of course Clint would know about the bottle of liquor Tony still has hidden in the workshop, because despite how well Tony plays up the "functioning" part of his functioning alcoholism there was never any hope of hiding the reality from either of the SHIELD wonder-twins. Tony has always known that, but it still takes him aback with how much it hurts to hear Clint mention it so casually, to hear Clint tell him to drink when he knows-

It's late on a Saturday and it had been a good day, a lazy and relaxing day, and Tony is almost a week sober. But that doesn't stop him from standing up, opening one of the low cabinets lining the wall, and pulling out an old bottle of whiskey that's been hidden there almost since he finished renovating the Tower after the Battle of New York. He sits back on his heels and rolls the bottle in his hands, tells himself that _if_ he drinks it’s going to be to help Barton and not because he just desperately wants to drink, and asks, "If I drink with you, are you actually going to talk?"

“Nope,” Clint says, “but you should drink anyway, ‘s more fun.”

“That’s the fucking problem,” Tony mutters under his breath, but he's pretty sure Barton is lying. Clint came down here looking for him for some reason, was drinking supposedly because of him, and he's pretty sure Clint wants to talk about whatever's eating at him more than he's letting on. 

But that doesn’t mean Tony has to drink with him to get him to talk.

He slams the bottle of whisky against the workbench, startling Clint who had fallen into a bit of a drunken daze, and pushes a mostly-clean coffee cup towards him. “Have at it,” he says. “But I’m not joining you.”

Clint shrugs, like he couldn’t care less despite goading Tony only a few minutes earlier. “Your loss,” he says, and pours himself a healthy portion of the whiskey. 

“Not really,” Tony replies, but if Clint hear him he doesn’t give any sort of response, just tips his head back and drains the cup in one, long draught. “You feel like talking yet?” Tony asks as Clint pours himself another drink. 

Clint shrugs. “Nothing to talk about.”

“Bullshit. You came down here for something.”

“I came down here to fight you,” Clint tells him, which surprises Tony because he’s pretty sure he doesn’t remember Clint trying to throw a punch at any point. “Decided that might be a bad idea.”

“You really have to stop resorting to _punch first, talk later_ ,” Tony says. “Why were you going to fight me?”

“Because it’s your fault,” is Clint’s only reply. 

Tony rolls his eyes. “Yeah, yeah, my fault that you’re drinking, we’ve established that.”

But Clint shakes his head, so hard that when he looks back up at Tony he’s a little cross-eyed, and says, “ _No_. I mean, yes, but that’s…”

Tony is starting to get worried now, or at least more worried than he already was. "Wait, wait, wait, are you serious- Did I actually do something to upset you?" Tony asks incredulously. "Before this afternoon I hadn't seen you in, like, three days! What did I do?"

"Fucking hell, just leave it alone, Stark." Clint's words are muffled by the glass of whiskey and slurred from the drinking, and if Tony hadn't been expecting exactly that response he wouldn't have caught it at all. 

"Nuh-uh, nope, absolutely not," Tony says. "You don't want to talk about Nat? Fine. You don't want to talk about Bobbi and whatever the fuck continues to go wrong with your attempts at romantic relationships? That's... Well, I'll figure out what's going on there eventually so if you don't want to talk about it now then just don't. Hell, if you had told me that you had come down here because you wanted company while you drank yourself stupid that would've been enough for me- _would have_ , past tense, because now you're saying that I'm responsible for something here and I want to know what."

Clint doesn't say anything, just keeps staring into his drink, and Tony lets out a huff of frustration. "Really? You're just gonna drop that bombshell on me and then not say anything else?"

Tony notices the way that Clint's hand tightens around the glass, the way his jaw clenches, the absolutely pointed way he refuses to look in Tony's direction. And Tony knows that he should let this go, should stop trying to pry for information, because Clint is drunk and clearly not in the mood to talk despite coming down to the workshop, and nothing good can come from continuing to needle at Clint like this. But Tony can't let the conversation go, not now that there's a very, very good chance that at some unknown point he fucked up something badly enough that Clint, even drunk off his ass, is being stubbornly tight-lipped about what he did. 

"Clint, please," Tony says, and he's not begging but even he will admit that he's been startlingly sincere in this moment. "If I fucked up, I want to know. All joking aside, if I did something I want to know what I-"

"You fucking came out to us, that's what you did!" Clint bites out suddenly, and Tony goes very, very still.

Of all the things Tony was expecting- which, considering the number of admittedly dumb jokes he makes at his teammates' expenses on a weekly basis, there were a lot of possible scenarios he had been considering- that hadn't been one of them. Had he been misreading the situation with Clint all along? Had Tony been imagining Clint's discomfort towards Natasha, when it had been discomfort towards him all along?

For a moment Tony feels outside his own body, so thrown by Clint's outburst that he can't focus on anything at all. He's overwhelmed by a feeling of betrayal, so painfully familiar that it's like a stab to the chest. He's used to people faking friendships with him; Stane was not the first, and Tony is not delusional enough to think he'd be the last. But he never would have thought that one of the Avengers, one of his own goddamn teammates, would lie to him like this. 

Either Clint's tongue is finally loose enough to talk, or he finally realizes exactly how that outburst sounded, because after a few too-long seconds of stunned silence the archer starts babbling again, “You came out and started talking about aromantic shit and everyone is researching it and acting like everything is fine and nothing about this is fucking fine! Because if you’re aromantic and that’s fine then Natasha has been wrong this whole fucking time and I’m-” He cuts off suddenly, viciously, and downs the rest of his drink. “I’m not fucking drunk enough for this, that’s what I am.”

"Yeah, well, that can be fixed," Tony says, still in a bit of a daze and trying to process Barton's rambling. God knows that wasn't the only bottle of liquor stashed in the workshop, and Tony grabs the half-empty bottle of vodka that he had hidden behind a cabinet and almost forgotten about, while Clint pours himself another drink from the whiskey and sets to work draining that as well.

Tony sets the vodka down next to Clint, careful to leave it far enough away that the archer won't accidentally knock it over in a moment of drunken pique, and turns over Clint's words in his mind. 

He thinks he knows what's going on now- at least, he hopes he knows what's going on because the only other alternative involves the sort of lies and betrayal that Tony knows he can't handle coming from a teammate. Barton's word-vomited explanation hadn't been entirely coherent but Tony still thinks he got the gist of what's going on in Clint's drunken brain. Now he just has to tread carefully and try not to fuck up this conversation anymore.

"Okay," Tony says at last. "I have one question for you."

"Just one?" Clint says sarcastically. Tony pretends not to notice how his hand shakes as he grabs the bottle of liquor again. 

"I really think one question is all I'm going to need," Tony says. As long as he's right about this, that is. Clint doesn't say anything to that and Tony just keeps talking, trying to stay casual to hide how much his heart is still racing. “It’s actually the question Sam asked you when we hired Holly, do you remember that?”

Clint shakes his head but, given the way his jaw is clenched so tight it's a wonder his eyes haven't popped out of his head yet, Tony is willing to bet that he's lying. Like he lied when Sam posed the question four months ago, but that's easier to understand considering he was surrounded by the entirety of the Avengers at the time... including Natasha. Tony doesn't know what Clint meant by her "being wrong this whole fucking time" but he's willing to bet that that time frame goes back further than just eleven months ago. 

Clint looks like he's about to vibrate out of his skin with anxiety, so Tony asks the question he's been dying to get an answer to ever since February, ever since Clint first talked about dating Bobbi and the seed was planted in Tony’s mind. "Clint, are you aromantic?"

This is the root of tonight's particular problem, Tony knows it is, and maybe he had been half-expecting some Hollywood-perfect scene where Clint suddenly sags in relief and spills all of his deep fears and worries about his romantic orientation. What happens instead is that Clint shrugs, still as tense as a piano wire, and takes another sip of his drink. "I have no fucking idea. How the fuck is anyone supposed to know that shit anyway?"

“A reliable source informs me that “butterflies” play an important role in figuring out if you’re romantically attracted to someone,” Tony says.

Clint snorts. "Really? Butterflies? You go through your own fucking identity crisis and the best you can give me is butterflies?"

"Hey, don't look at me, I'm not the expert in what romantic love feels like," Tony says. "I don't experience that shit at all." He cocks his head, studying Clint for a moment, looking past the painfully drunk exterior and trying to work out what's going on in the man's head. "What about you?" he finally asks. 

"What about me what?"

"Do you experience romantic love?" Tony asks. "I mean, that's a pretty important thing to figure out if you want to know if you're aro or not."

"Like I said, I don't fucking know," Clint snaps. "It's like- like it's there sometimes and then other times it's not. It'll go away once I start dating someone, or I'll realize it was never love and was just... fuck, I don't even know. Fucking indigestion or something, it just wasn't real to begin with. And- and sometimes it is real and I know I love someone but I still fuck it up 'cause I just can't do relationships right. I can't- I can't fucking figure it out. 's like everyone got a translator when they hit puberty and mine got lost in the mail sometime when I was running around with carnies."

And that officially wins the award for "Saddest Sentence Tony Stark Has Heard All Year" and he doesn't even consider cracking a joke about it, not for a single second. 

"So if I’m understanding you right you don’t know if you’re aromantic because sometimes the attraction is there, and sometimes it’s not, and you can’t tell if the attraction is romantic or something else altogether," Tony summarizes instead. "Does that sound about right?"

Clint nods and, okay, they're making progress here.“Have you looked at any of the grey-aromantic labels out there?” Tony asks.

"Grey-aromantic...?" Clint repeats slowly, frowning in confusion.. 

And Tony has to frown too because he knows Clint's heard that word before- hell, Sam used it when Tony came out to him and Thor, and Tony very definitely remembers Clint being there. (He also clearly remembers the look Clint gave Natasha during that conversation, and given what little Clint has already let slip Tony wonders if maybe he wasn't the only person to have a Nat-induced identity crisis in their life.) But if Clint is seriously struggling to place that phrase...

Oh. 

Well, shit. 

"Okay, I'm going to rephrase that last question," Tony says. "Have you looked into anything about aromantic identities since I came out to you guys?" Because he knows that Nat and Steve had done their own research, and Bruce and Sam already had some knowledge about aromanticism... but the more he thinks about it, the more he's pretty sure he's never heard of Clint looking into this himself. 

There's a beat of silence where Tony almost thinks Clint is going to lie again, or simply refuse to answer the question at all, but then the archer sighs and admits, "No. I haven't." And Tony is surprised when Clint doesn't leave it there, instead also saying, "I didn't want to think about this. If I didn't know anything I didn't have to find out if I- if I was..."

"If you were aromantic," Tony finishes, when Clint's words trail off and he doesn't finish that thought. 

Clint shrugs. "Or that I'm not."

"Jesus, you have issues with this, don't you?" Tony mutters. It's understandable, if a little infuriating to work around now. Tony remembers being a little daunted at the idea that his weird romantic hang-up could be an actual identity. He imagines that feeling must be a lot worse for someone who can't tell if they experience romantic love just occasionally or not- to say nothing of also dealing with whatever bullshit Natasha may have put into Clint's head god knows how many years ago. 

"Okay, first things first: JARVIS, lock down the workshop, total isolation and that includes Rhodey and Pep," Tony says. He can hear the locks on the door immediately engage, and the glass walls surrounding the workshop turn opaque. "If someone asks tell them that I'm deconning the space- or that I've hit a bad patch with the armor and am pissed off, whatever will make Cap worry less." Tony turns back to Clint and asks, "Unless you'd rather go somewhere else for this conversation?"

"I don't think I can move," Clint admits, sounding miserably drunk. 

Tony sighs. "J, please also send fruit baskets to Rhodey and Pepper and Happy and anyone who's ever had to deal with me when I was drunk because dear lord they have the patience of saints."

"Fuck you," Clint says again, although this time it's noticeably more slurred than usual. “Help me- help me find my phone. I gotta send a text.”

Part of Tony wonders for a moment if he should cut Clint off, or at least take away the half-bottle of vodka before the archer can drink himself into a coma. But Tony also knows, from painful first-hand experience, that someone as drunk as Clint is probably won't take kindly to that and Tony would much rather get to the bottom of this aromantic mess than fight with Clint about his drinking. Especially because- pot, kettle, et cetera. 

“It’s in your pocket, I can see it from here, and I’m not getting it for you,” Tony says. Clint grabs the phone with a crow of triumph and begins sloppily typing a message. “Who do you need to text anyway?”

“Dog,” Clint says.

“Dog,” Tony repeats. “You’re… texting a dog?”

Clint has no business giving Tony that particular look of disgust, not with how drunk he is. “No, I’m texting _about_ a dog,” he says. “I gave Kate my dog to look after before I came back here and she's gonna steal him again if I don’t meet her tomorrow and I’m not gonna be able to meet her. I need- I need to tell her to bring Lucky back to my place ‘cause I’ll be there later so it’s okay to leave him.” 

“Right, I always forget you have that hidey-hole in Brooklyn,” Tony mutters. “And a dog, really Barton? A dog that you make your sidekick watch for you?”

“Don’t call Katie-Kate a sidekick she’ll kick your ass,” Clint says. “And it’s not a hidey-hole it’s a- it’s a building. I got it from the Russians. Got Lucky from the Russians too.” There’s a pause as Clint’s fingers fumble over the touchscreen keyboard and then he adds, a little absentmindedly, “He’s missing an eye. But I saved the rest of him.”

“That phrasing is just so wrong,” Tony says. “And I’m- frankly I’m going to ignore the rest of what you said, I don’t need to think about you maybe illegally owning an entire building.”

“‘s not illegal,” Clint mutters. He sends the text and tosses his phone aside. “Got a lawyer to look into it. Says I should be okay and he’ll help me beat up the Tracksuit Mafia.”

Tony decides that he's just going to roll with whatever Clint is saying and pretend that he understands it. The night has already been far, far too long and Clint is too drunk for Tony to start questioning him about an entirely new topic now. "Alright then," he says, because honestly, what else is there to say to that? 

"Time for more questions," Tony continues finally sitting back down on the other stool. "What, exactly, do you think aromantic means?"

"Not feeling romantic attraction to people," Clint says. He sounds confused, like he's not sure where Tony is going with this, and Tony has to resist the urge to facepalm because Jesus, Clint really missed a lot of information here. 

"Yeah, of course, but what I mean is- do you think aro people never feel romantic attraction at all, ever, under any circumstances?" Tony presses.

"Well... you never experience romantic attraction..." Clint say slowly.

Tony sighs and looks up at the ceiling with an expression of pained suffering on his face. "Good lord I can't believe I'm being held up as the pinnacle of any identity, let alone aromantic ones. Okay Barton, aromanticism 101: It’s not an all-or-nothing sort of deal.”

“What?” 

“It’s a spectrum, like most things like this,” Tony explains, and god help him but part of him really wishes he had taken Clint up on his offer to drink. Maybe this conversation would be less painful if Tony wasn't quite so sober. “Sexualities aren’t limited to gay or straight. Gender isn’t limited to male or female. There are more romantic orientations than just alloromantic and the no-romantic-attraction-at-all-ever flavor of aromantic.”

Clint stares at Tony, looking at him like he's grown an extra head or something. " _What?_ " he repeats.

“Grey-aromantics are a thing,” Tony says, trying so very hard to make sure that his voice stays calm and level. “People who experience romantic attraction sometimes, but not all the time. Or only under certain circumstances. Or don’t know if they experience romantic attraction or platonic or anything else. It’s not one-or-the-other, it’s a spectrum. And quite frankly I think you fall somewhere on that spectrum.”

"No," Clint says, quietly, almost to himself. "No, not that's not possible, that's not- that can't be-"

"Why can't it be possible?" Tony asks, and he has to force himself to stay patient. Barton has some weird hang-up about this, Tony's picked up on that easily enough. He wants to figure out what's going on here and try to actually help Clint, and he can't do that if he loses his cool right now. 

Clint jumps, and Tony wonders if maybe Clint had been talking to himself after all. There's certainly a dazed look to his face, like he's caught up in own thoughts and not entirely in the here-and-now with Tony. But that changes in a split-second as Clint scowls and says loudly, heatedly, "Because I can't be aromantic!"

"Why not?" Tony asks.

“Because if I’m aromantic then Natasha was wrong and the last six years are _fucking bullshit!_ ”

There’s near silence after Clint’s outburst, the only sound Clint’s heavy breathing and the rattle of glass knocking against the counter as he picks up his drink with a very unsteady hand. Tony would be willing to bet that Clint hadn't intended on actually letting that little tidbit slip out, especially considering the archer won't even look at him now. 

Tony takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly. “Look, it’s obvious you have some baggage with Natasha-” and yeah, Tony doesn’t miss Clint's flinch at the mention of Nat, "-and I am so very much not the person to help you with that. What I can help you with, if you want? Is doing some basic research about grey-aro identities.”

“And if I don’t want that?” Clint mumbles. He finishes his drink again and he sets it back down on the counter, this time turning to the half-empty bottle of vodka. Tony does not envy his stomach in the morning.

“Then we’ll drop the subject and I’ll keep you company while you drink, or help you back to your room if you don’t want company,” Tony says.

Clint narrows his eyes and squints at Tony. “Why are you being so- so-?” He waves a hand, nearly upending the bottle over the bar. 

Tony takes a moment to think, weighing his words carefully before he speaks. "I've suspected that you might be aro-spec for awhile," he finally admits. "From things you've said, and the way you act and react in certain situations, but I thought you were researching things or at the very least talking about it with Nat. But you've been acting weird around her- and I definitely know now that something is going on there, so don't think of denying it- so I started thinking that maybe you weren't talking about it with her. And that maybe you weren't thinking about this at all." 

Tony shrugs, not sure what else to say. "I'm a nosy asshole, you know that. I was probably going to pester you about this eventually because the curiosity was killing me. You coming down here drunk just sped up that timeline a bit."

"Oh, how lucky for me," Clint mutters. It doesn't come out quite as sarcastic as Tony thinks it was supposed to sound. "Well sorry to ruin your fun, Stark, but I don't want to actually research this. I'm-"

"If you say "fine" I'm cutting you off and tossing your ass out of my workshop," Tony interrupts. "Because clearly you're not fine with this. If you were fine you wouldn't be down here drinking and spilling your secrets to me. I think you want to research this but you have some fucked-up version of the Sunk Cost Fallacy holding you back. Just because you've spent apparently six goddamn years telling yourself that you experience romantic attraction like everyone else doesn't mean that you have to keep lying to yourself now."

"'s easier though," Clint insists. 

"Easier," Tony echoes, a little dumbfounded. "Easier than what? Than not hating yourself? Than not hating Natasha?"

"I don't hate Natasha," Clint cuts in viciously. "I don't hate her. I hate what she _said_. There's a difference."

"What did she say?" Tony asks, because there's no way he can pass up an opening like that. 

But Clint shakes his head and says, “No. No no _no_ , not talking about her or that.”

"Well apparently you aren't talking about anything anymore, if you don't want to even consider looking into-"

"It's easier," Clint interrupts him again. "To just be fucked up. To not- not love people right. Than to have an explanation for it, a real explanation, and have to deal with dating and telling Natasha and- and everything else." He glares at Tony, bleary-eyed and drunk off his ass, and adds, "I hate you, y'know. For having your relationship with Pepper and Rhodes. You don't even feel romantic love and you get to have them and I hate you for that."

Not for the first time Tony is profoundly grateful that he's not drunk right now. Drunk-Tony probably would have taken some offense at that, but Sober-Tony feels his heart break a little. He'd never be stupid enough to pity Barton, because he knows that that's the last thing the archer wants or needs, but that doesn't mean that he's unaffected by Clint's words. "You're really trying to outdo yourself with the tragic sentences tonight, aren't you?" he mutters under his breath. 

"Hmm?" Clint says, questioning, having not caught what Tony said. Good. He didn't need to hear that. 

"Nothing," Tony lies. "Listen, have you considered that, maybe, actually thinking about your romantic orientation and what you want- and are comfortable with- in a relationship might make your relationship attempts go a little smoother? Instead of forcing yourself to play out some amatonormative storyline that, clearly, you don't quite fit into?"

Clint just stares at Tony. "What the fuck are you talking about?"

Tony sighs and says, "Okay, look. My relationship only works because Pepper and Rhodey know I'm aromantic and romance-repulsed, and they respect that and they don't push for more than I can give them. You can also have a relationship where your partner doesn't push you for more, and where they know that your idea of "romantic gestures" might not match up with theirs and that you might not be able to read their romantic needs as easily as they're used to. As long as you're upfront about that crap, and your partner is willing to work with you? You can make a relationship work, Barton. Being aromantic doesn't mean you have to be alone- though there's nothing wrong with being alone if that's what you want instead."

Clint keeps staring while Tony talks, his eyes a little unfocused but Tony's pretty sure that he hears him. Whether he understands what Tony is saying is a different story. "Okay," Clint says at last. "Okay. Let's do it."

"Do... what?" Tony asks, a little cautious, because he can't quite follow Clint's drunken logic and he's not entirely sure what the archer is talking about. 

"Research. Looking shit up," Clint says. He takes a swig from the bottle of vodka and coughs, hard enough that there's a moment of pure terror where Tony thinks Clint is going to vomit over the otherwise-clean workbench. But Clint manages to keep the liquor down and, after a moment, he rasps, "I'm game. Fire up Google and let's do this shit."

Tony suddenly has a bad feeling about how the rest of this night is going to go, but since this was his idea it's hardly like he can back down now. "Alright, JARVIS, you know what sites to pull up," he says, and several screens pop up in front of where Clint is sitting. The archer, startled, nearly falls backward off the stool, but Tony manages to catch him and push him back upright at the last second. "Okay, Clint," Tony says, gesturing towards the websites. "Let's have at it."

Tony has no idea how successful they're actually going to be with this. He just hopes that Clint will be sober enough to remember any of this in the morning. 


	2. Chapter 2

Clint's awareness of the world comes back in fits and pieces. A burst of familiar song somewhere far, far below his head. The feeling of cold, hard metal underneath his body. The quiet murmur of voices. Footsteps. The smell of coffee. A pounding headache attempting to pulverize his skull from the inside out.

And then, inexplicably, Tony.

"So I took the liberty of answering your phone because it wouldn't fucking stop ringing. And, really, the Dog Cops theme? That's your ringtone?"

"Go fuck yourself," Clint groans. His mouth feels like death, and he's only just barely maintaining control over his stomach. 

"Sorry, tried it, didn't really work well for me." Tony's voice is oddly muffled and almost disorienting to listen to. Clint reaches up with fumbling hand to readjust his hearing aid, which he had managed to nearly dislodge in his sleep. "Wanna tell me why your protégé was calling demanding to know where you were? I thought you texted the kid last night."

Last night. What the fuck had he even been doing last night? And, more pressingly: "Where am I?" Clint asks. He could open his eyes to figure that out, but he's not sure those muscles are working at the moment. 

"My workshop," Tony answers. 

The futzing workshop? Why had he-

"You said you came down here wanting to fight me," Tony adds. Clint isn’t sure how much of an explanation that actually is.

"Did I manage that?" Clint asks, trying to wrack his own mind for memories from the night before. There had been alcohol. A lot of alcohol. He remembers that much.

"Didn't even try to throw a punch," Tony says. 

"Well damn."

"We did do a lot of talking, though," Tony continues. "Or at least, I did a lot of talking and you spent a lot of time telling me that we weren't allowed to talk about things."

That jogs some of Clint’s memories, a few scattered pieces of the previous night slowly coming back to him, and he groans because he doesn’t like what he’s starting to remember. "Please tell me I didn't actually come down here to yell at you for making me think about aromantic identities."

"Nope, that's exactly what happened," Tony says. Clint's glad his eyes are closed; he would bet that Tony has a disgustingly smug grin on his face right now. "Do you remember the part where I had to explain to you what grey-aromantic identities are?"

"Yes," Clint admits. "And... Did I Google...?"

"Yes," Tony says. "Yes you did. I think you found a label you liked? But you wouldn't tell me what it was."

Clint thinks he remembers the label he found, but he's nowhere near coherent enough to risk telling Tony what it is in case he’s remembering it wrong. "Not telling you now, either," he says.

"Of course not," Tony says. "You wanna open your eyes at some point? Maybe think about calling Kate back?"

Clint's pretty sure he can only accomplish, optimistically, one of those things for the time being. He settles on trying to open his eyes, and even though Tony was considerate enough to leave the workshop lights off and the equipment shut down, it still takes Clint far too long to get his eyes to focus and even the dim lighting makes his head throb painfully. He's staring up at the ceiling of the workshop, and he can see Tony standing next to him out of the corner of his eye but he's not sure he wants to move his head quite yet to look at him directly. 

At least he has an answer to one of his earlier confusions: namely, what the hell he’s lying on. "Is this your workbench?" Clint asks. His voice sounds like he's been gargling with gravel and he thinks the next order of business needs to be _bathroom_ followed immediately by _drink some goddamn water_.

"Yes," Tony says. "I offered you the couch but you refused to let go of the workbench and instead crawled on top of it to sleep."

That part of the night Clint doesn't remember and, right now, he's more concerned about what other gaping memory holes he might have. "So I came down here drunk, we got talking about aro crap, you had me look up identities?" Clint summarizes. "Does that seem about right?"

"More or less, yeah," Tony says. "You were a hot mess, don't get me wrong, but the exact details of last night will stay between JARVIS, me, and that sieve you have for a brain."

"Thanks.” He might as well take Tony's words at face-value, because it's not like he's in any shape do otherwise. Clint takes a deep breath and manages to roll over onto his side, then push himself mostly upright with his legs dangling over the workbench. Awesome, practically halfway there. 

"Need help?" Tony asks. Clint finally glances over at the other man, taking in his coffee mug and the rumpled shirt that tells Clint that Tony didn't have a particularly restful night either. 

"Think I can manage." Clint's descent from the workbench isn't so much a slide or a hop as it is a barely-controlled slump. He catches himself on the edge of the table and hauls himself upright- an action which his stomach protests against. Violently. 

Clint can almost feel the color drain out of his face at the sudden vertigo and nausea, and Tony's eyes go wide with horror. "Bathroom, now!" Tony snaps, grabbing Clint's arm and half-dragging, half-carrying him across the workshop. Despite what he said less than a minute ago, Clint is grateful for the assist because he's doubt that he actually would have been able to manage even the short trek to the bathroom on his own in his current state.

Tony, thankfully, doesn't stick around while Clint empties the contents of his stomach and Clint takes the brief moment of privacy to wish for death and curse his idiotic drunk self for putting himself in this position. He remembers enough of the previous night now to hate the drunken logic that took him from over-analyzing his break up and the argument with Nat, to storming down to the workshop wanting to fight Tony. At least he didn't manage to do that. Clint certainly wouldn't want to explain to Cap how Stark ended up with a black eye. 

And, sure, maybe he has a new romantic orientation now, if his memories of looking up definitions of a seemingly endless amount of identities are actually true. But what the fuck does that matter anyway? He's not having this conversation with Natasha, which means he can't exactly tell anyone else. And maybe Tony was right when he said that it would be easier to navigate a relationship once he understands how his own attraction works... but right now, Clint's not sure he wants another relationship. He had a good run with Bobbi but maybe he's not as ready to step back into the dating game as he thought he was. 

Or maybe he's just too scared to try and have it blow up in his face again. Who the fuck even knows anymore.

When Clint thinks he can finally stand without immediately wanting to die again, he does his best to rinse the taste of vomit out of his mouth before shuffling back out into the workshop. He's not used to actually spending time down here that doesn't involve bothering Tony about new, and increasingly ridiculous, arrows so he's not actually entirely sure what's safe to hang around and he pauses by the bathroom door to look around the space.

"Over here, Barton," Tony calls out. He's back at the workbench that Clint remembers from the night before (and that he apparently slept on- drunk him definitely does not make great decisions, and his back is already regretting that particular one) and Clint carefully weaves his way over. "I have coffee, and toast, and water. I'd suggest starting with the water but, hey, it's your stomach."

"Thanks." Clint's grateful that Tony isn't rubbing the hangover in his face, because he doesn't think he could handle that. Although it would be a dick move from Tony Stark, of all people... "Oh god."

Tony frowns. "What?" he asks, voice sharp with fear and concern. 

"I tried to goad you into drinking last night," Clint says with growing horror as that memory slowly resurfaces in his mind. 

Clint doesn't understand why Tony immediately relaxes at his words. "Oh, yeah. That. It's no big deal."

"No big deal?" Clint echoes, incredulous. "You're trying to stop drinking and I fucking-"

"You didn't mean it," Tony interrupts. "And I knew that. So yeah. It's no big deal."

"It's-"

Tony sighs and pinches the bridge of his nose. "Oh my god, and I thought drunk you was bad." 

Clint flinches at those words. He knows he can be a mean, violent drunk when he gets worked up- just like his fucking father was, and that's really not a thought that he needs to be entertaining this morning.

"Jesus, no, that wasn't-" Tony sighs again and Clint has to wonder at the spectacle they make: him, hungover as fuck, and Tony _futzing_ Stark trying to comfort him. If Clint didn't feel like shit he'd almost want to laugh at it. "Look, you and I have both had our fair share of bad experiences with drunkards, and last night you weren't even close to being as bad my father or- for that matter, me. Was trying to goad me into drinking a shitty thing to do? Yeah, absolutely, and if you do that again I'm having Dummy throw you off the roof of the Tower. But last night was different and I'm voting that we let it die, because that really shouldn't be what you're worried about right now."

"Yeah? Then what should I be worried about?" Clint challenges.

"The fact that Kate Bishop was calling you incessantly and threatening to steal your dog? Or did you forget about that already?" Tony says.

He had, actually, but he’s not going to admit to that. "I'm confused, is what I am," Clint says instead. "Didn't I text her last night?" He thought he had, and he knows that had been the plan, but with a memory like Swiss cheese it's hard to tell if he actually got around to doing that or not. 

"I thought you did. I mean there was a lot of babbling about dogs and the Russian mafia and a building that you were insisting you owned legally, but I also thought there was texting involved, so I was very surprised when Bishop called wondering why you hadn't met her to take your dog back." Tony grabs Clint's phone and holds it out to him, and Clint is almost pathetically grateful that Tony didn't just toss it for him to catch.

When he pulls up his text messages he sees the ones he sent last night immediately.

_katiekate im so sorry i cant meet you to pick up pizza dog tomorrow im aro_

_i mean drunk_

_i mean i am also aro but i cant meet you because of the drnuk. im blaming stark. it shis fault im aro._

_i mean its not but it still is u kno_

_oh wait u can drop lucky off at m y place if u want ill be back tomrrow when im sober enough to get to bedstuy im just not gonna be able to meet u in the morning_

_also dont tell nat about the aro thing_

_ur the best katekate_

The only problem was that it wasn’t _Kate_ that he sent those texts to. 

"Oh fuck. Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh _fuck_ -" Clint doesn't realize that he's shaking until he nearly drops his phone; only Tony grabbing it at the last minute keeps it from shattering against the floor. 

Tony reads the texts and swears under his breath. "That's definitely not Kate that you sent those to."

"No, it's fucking _Natasha_ ," Clint snarls. His heart is beating wildly in his chest and he feels like he might throw up again. There's no response from Nat but they're all marked _read_ , so he knows that she saw them. Of all the ways he could have fucked up last night this is by far the worst. 

"Okay, I know you have some weird history with Natasha-"

 _Understatement of the fucking century_ , Clint thinks.

"-and last night you were, probably unintentionally, dropping some not-so-subtle hints that there's a specific romance-related incident that you've been hung up lately. But, realistically, what's the worst that could happen here?" Tony asks, no doubt trying to be optimistic in an attempt to calm Clint down- but it isn’t going to work.

"Natasha leaves the team," Clint says immediately, because he's thought about this too many times.

Tony raises an eyebrow in surprise. " _What?_ "

"I know Nat, and the first thing she's going to want to know is why I didn't tell her I thought I was aro sooner." That actually might not be true. The first thing Natasha could do is insist that Clint doesn't know what he's talking about and that he can't really be aromantic. Again. "And when I explain that, she's going to go into a guilt-spiral that will make the months since she accidentally screwed with your head seem like a cake walk, and if it gets bad enough she'll convince herself that the only way to "make amends"-" and Clint isn't above miming air quotes around that, "-is to disappear so she doesn't hurt me again."

Tony whistles lowly. "I wish I could say I was surprised about that but... knowing what I do about Natasha Romanov? I don't think I actually am. What in the hell did she say to you, to get the two of you to this place?"

_Don't be an idiot, Clint..._

"It doesn't matter," Clint says. 

"Like hell it doesn't!" Tony retorts. "If it was bad enough that it could theoretically drive Natasha to leave the team-"

"It was that bad, and that's why you don't need to know what it was," Clint interrupts. "What she said was..." He shakes his head. "It was fucked up, I'm not gonna lie about that, but that's exactly why you don't need to know the specifics."

"Right. You two super-spies, always protecting each other," Tony mutters. 

"Ever think that maybe it's not just Natasha I'm trying to protect here?" Clint asks. "The things she said have fucked me up for six years. I'm not sharing that with you, and letting it twist you up inside too. Nat has her own issues with romance- always has and probably always will. But she's trying to work past that. She's accepted your identity and aromantic identities in general, and with any luck she'll get past herself and be fine with me. But I'm not telling you what she said and letting you hate her, or letting her words ruin the friendship that you both deny having."

Tony studies him for a moment, eyes narrowed as if he’s waiting for the other shoe to drop. Clint just sighs and rests his head on his folded arms on top of the workbench. He’s too fucking exhausted to play mindgames with Stark. 

“Fine. You’re being surprisingly mature and sincere about this, so I’ll back off,” Tony says at last. “But are you going to be okay talking to her? You seem matter-of-fact now but that could just be the hangover, ‘cause you were seriously losing it last night…”

No, Clint is not going to be okay talking to Natasha because despite whatever he says to Stark he's not holding out much hope that the conversation will go well. He's hoping that he'll be wrong about that, sure, but he doubts he is- not that he can tell Tony that. He already shared too much with the other Avenger, both last night while drunk and now this morning while hungover. There's only so much of his soul he can stand to bare in one day. 

So Clint forces himself to smirk, just a little, forces a trace of humor into his voice even though he wants to run screaming from both this conversation and what's waiting for him later in the day, and says, "Yeah, Stark, I think I'll be fine. I've been dealing with Nat for years. I know how to handle her."

"Uh-huh," Tony says, sounding wholly unconvinced by Clint's charade. "Because if you wanted someone there as back-up..."

"Yeah, no," Clint cuts him off, even though there is a part of him that's actually touched by the offer. "Having witnesses won't make the conversation any easier. I'll be fine. Really."

"Okay," Tony says, as if that's it. No pushing, no more demands for answers... it almost makes Clint suspicious. 

"Why are you being so-?" Clint waves a hand, both searching for the right word and hoping that Tony will understand what he means by the gesture alone. 

Surprisingly, Tony does seem to understand. "You had a rough time of it last night, and honestly I'm not sure how much of what you're saying now is you actually accepting that you're aro-spec and being genuinely prepared to talk to Natasha, and how much is you bluffing because you're scared shitless. Either way..." Tony shrugs. "It doesn't take any effort to not be a dick to someone who's hungover and probably just had his world turned upside down. Even if you guys sometimes think otherwise about me."

"We don't think otherwise," Clint says immediately, almost without thinking. "Not, like, seriously at least. If we say otherwise it's all joking."

Tony's mouth drops open in a little "o" of surprise. "Okay then."

Clint scrubs a hand over his face, wonders not for the first time why the prerequisite for being an Avenger seems to involve emotional stunting, and decides that if he's already been this sincere he might as well go for broke. "Look, just... thanks. For not being a dick to me about this, because you could've been a bit of an asshole and no one would've blamed you. I was rotten to you when you first came out to us, and even though I just didn't know I shouldn't have said some of the shit I did." 

Clint's pretty sure that _How do you not love anyone? That's like a universal thing, loving people._ is going to haunt him for a long time yet.

"Even that doesn't warrant me being an asshole about this," Tony says. "But, hey. Thanks for the apology. Don't get me wrong it's totally unnecessary, but... yeah. Thanks."

And Clint thinks he knows Tony well enough to recognize the sincerity hidden underneath the billionaire's flippant tone. "Don't mention it," Clint says. "Now, if you'll excuse me, I think I have a phone call to make and an assassin to find, don't I?" Clint manages to stand up without feeling like he's going to vomit again, so at least that part of his morning is starting to look up.

"Hey," Tony calls out when Clint is almost at the door. When Clint turns back around, Tony says, "Will you tell me how it goes with Nat? I'd like the heads-up if we're gonna be down an Avenger."

Clint suspects that it's more him that Tony's worried about, rather than the Avengers line-up, but he doesn't say as much. "Sure," he says. "Can't promise I'll give details, but... yeah, I'll let you know how it goes."

But the first thing on his to-do list isn't talking to Natasha. It's doing damage control with Kate. Luckily he manages to make it to his apartment in the Tower, his only hope for privacy with this conversation, without running into anyone else.

“Clint Barton, I am going to kill you!”

Even though Kate sounds absolutely furious Clint can’t help but smirk, just a little, at the sound of her voice. But that short-lived, tiny smile doesn’t do anything to mask the sheer exhaustion in Clint’s voice when he says, “I know, Kate. I’m sorry. Would you believe I tried texting you but sent the messages to the wrong person?”

“Yes, because this is you we’re talking about,” Kate replies immediately, but her tone is a little softer than it was before, and then she asks, “Is everything okay, Hawkeye? You don’t sound good, and not just in a hungover way.”

“It’s been a really, really long twenty-four hours,” Clint admits. “It’s been…” He swallows harshly, wonders how much he can say before he veers into over-sharing territory. He doesn't need to do that with Kate, not after having just escaped the mess he made with Stark. "It's been a lot," he says at last, and he knows that doesn't describe half of it but he doesn't know what else to say. 

There's a worryingly long pause from Kate, long enough that Clint starts to wonder if the call got disconnected or if Kate's waiting for him to give an actual explanation. "Does this have anything to do with the phone call I got from Natasha this morning?" she finally asks hesitantly. 

Clint doesn't know if he wants to scream or laugh at that. "She's the one I texted instead of you, so probably, yeah," Clint tells her. "What did she... what did she say?"

"She just wanted to know if I'd heard from you recently, but she sounded pretty on-edge," Kate says. "I mean, more than usual. I told her I hadn't spoken to you since I took Lucky yesterday and she hung up. I thought it was weird, but when you didn't show up this morning..." Clint can almost picture Kate's apologetic shrug. "I might have been panicking a little when I called you six times in a row. Sorry about that."

"I'll pass the apology on to Stark because he's the one who was actually woken up by my phone ringing," Clint says. His thoughts are jumping all over the place, trying to figure out why Natasha would have called Kate before calling him. He doesn't know what Nat's thinking now and that scares him, like he's still scared about talking to her, and scared about really accepting this new identity, and scared about saying too much or too little to Kate.

"I'm less concerned about apologizing to Tony Stark and more concerned about you," Kate says. "How bad is the situation with Natasha gonna be? Because Lucky and I can be your intimidating backup if you need us to be."

"I think I'll be okay, Hawkeye," Clint says, and he knows he sounds a little choked up but Kate doesn't comment on it. Clint is more than willing to blame it on the hangover instead of admitting that, maybe, he's getting a little emotional over a second person showing that they care about him in a single day. 

"What do you need from me then, Hawkeye?" Kate asks. "Anything I can do?"

"Lucky-"

"I'll hold onto him," Kate says, before Clint can finish asking her to do just that. "My schedule's clear for a few days at least and America will be happy that she can keep spoiling him for a little while longer."

That makes Clint smile. "You won't need to watch him for that long. Just another day or so, until I can talk to Nat." Which he knows he won't be able to put off for long, no matter how much he may want to. 

"Don't worry about it, I've got this covered," Kate says. "And if you need anything else, just let me know. I promise not to mock you too much if you want to cry on my shoulder about the whole mess."

"There will be no crying on anyone's shoulders," Clint protests, but Kate just laughs and hangs up. He looks down at his phone and shakes his head. That girl- and all the up-and-coming vigilantes she hangs out with- are going to be the death of him one day. But damn does he love them all anyway.

His apartment is stiflingly quiet, and Clint wonders what the hell he's supposed to do with his day now. Is he supposed to go hunt down Nat, or wait for her to come to him? There's no part of him that wants to talk to her because he knows, he _knows_ , this conversation isn't going to go well. How could it? There's no way he can explain everything to Nat without hurting her, no way to unpack the last six years of their friendship without burning some of it in the process. How in the hell is he supposed to prepare for that?

"JARVIS, where's Natasha right now?" Clint asks. Maybe she left the Tower, making this whole internal debate a moot point. 

But of course, Clint can't ever be that lucky. "Agent Romanov is waiting outside your apartment," JARVIS replies and Clint feels his stomach lurch dangerously. "She wished to be informed when you left Sir's workshop, and made her way to your apartment after you had arrived."

"And now she's waiting to ambush me when I leave," Clint mutters under his breath. Of course, of _course_ she's waiting for him! She wouldn't want him sneaking away before she can confront him about this, after all.

Clint can't deal with this right now. Truthfully he's not sure he's ever going to be actually ready to face Natasha, but if she's already waiting outside his door he knows he can't avoid her for long (let alone forever). But he definitely can't handle talking to her now, when he still feels like death warmed over from his night of drinking.

"I'm going to go pass the fuck out now, JARVIS. Don't let Natasha into my apartment, you got that?" Clint says, as he tries to muster up the energy to actually move to his bedroom.

"Understood, Agent Barton. Shall I inform her that you are unavailable?" the AI asks.

Clint shakes his head. "No, don't- don't say anything." He doesn't want Natasha to know that he's aware of her presence and deliberately ignoring her; he doesn't think that would make the inevitable conversation any easier later.

JARVIS replies in the affirmative and Clint manages to drag his feet forward a few steps before deciding that, maybe, he's better off just sleeping on the couch in the living room instead.

XXXXX

By the time Clint wakes up again he has no idea what time it is, leaving him feeling disoriented and confused. "JARVIS, how long was I...?" he manages to mumble against the couch cushion that his face is buried against. One of these days, or nights, he's going to have to actually sleep in a bed again. He hates to admit it, but he's getting too old for crashing on the closest flat surface.

"You have been asleep for approximately five hours and forty-seven minutes," JARVIS replies.

Nearly six hours then. Great. This isn't the worst hangover that Clint's ever had, but it's pretty high up there.

Clint manages to leverage himself upright and is pleasantly surprised that his pounding headache from earlier has faded to a dull ache behind his eyes, something which promises to be manageable with painkillers and some water. Although right now he'd much rather down a pot of coffee.

"JARVIS, start my coffee pot," Clint mumbles as he stands up. "And please tell me I have Advil somewhere in my apartment."

"There is a bottle of generic ibuprofen in your spice cabinet," the AI replies, thankfully without much judgement about where Clint keeps his painkillers, and Clint can hear the coffee maker kick on in the kitchen. Sometimes he loves living in an AI-controlled Tower. 

"JARVIS, have I ever told you that you're my favorite?" Clint asks as he shuffles towards the kitchen. 

"Several times, usually while drunk or hungover," JARVIS replies. "However the sentiment is appreciated."

Clint snorts and pulls down the bottle of ibuprofen, downing two pills dry and opening his fridge. It's depressingly empty, partially because Clint keeps forgetting to put in an order for grocery delivery but also because Clint's just been spending most of his time recently either in Brooklyn or with Bobbi. 

And, yeah, it still hurts to think about her. Part of Clint wonders if they could make it work once he gets his romantic orientation figured out. Part of Clint thinks that it would be ridiculous to expect Bobbi Morse to work around his issues like that. 

_Not issues_ , he reminds himself, because if he's going to accept that he's aro-spec he has to stop letting himself fall back on the last six years worth of warped thinking. Just because he loves differently doesn't mean that he's broken, no matter what Natasha insinuated back then.

"Damnit," he mutters to himself, and has to resist the urge to punch his fridge in frustration. There's still the Natasha problem to deal with, isn't there?

"JARVIS, where's Natasha right now? And if you tell me she's still sitting outside my apartment I'm going to scream," Clint says. 

The noticeably lengthy pause from the AI tells Clint everything he needs to know, even before JARVIS replies, "Technically she is standing outside your apartment, Agent Barton."

"Of course she is, of fucking _course_ she is," Clint snarls. He lets himself be overwhelmed by the sudden burst of anger, because it's easier than letting himself remember that he still has no plan for what he's actually going to say to her. The anger, at least, is enough to get him to cross his apartment, storm up to his door and wrench it open.

"Really?" he bites out when he sees that Natasha is leaning against the wall directly across from his door. He recognizes her posture as one of feigned nonchalance, seemingly uncaring but ready to strike at any moment, and that makes him angry as well. 

To anyone else maybe Natasha's face would be unreadable, but Clint can see the stress lines at the corners of her eyes, can see the way her mouth is a little too tight, can see the way her hands are tucked in her pockets so Clint can't tell if they're shaking or not. In any other situation, Clint would be instantly worried about why Nat looked like this. But right now he's still too furious to even care.

"Was your plan to seriously just stand out here until I left my apartment so you could force me to talk to you?" Clint asks. A single muscle in Natasha's face twitches, but there's no answer. "For fuck's sake, say something, Nat!"

"What do you want me to say?" Natasha asks quietly. 

"At this point I'd take literally anything over you standing outside my apartment for another six hours," Clint says sarcastically. 

Natasha inhales slowly; Clint can't hear it but he can see her chest expand with the breath. "I'm scared of saying the wrong thing," she admits. 

The specific use of "scared" makes Clint pause, because even around him Natasha doesn't usually admit her emotions that easily. But now that she's said it, Clint can see just how true it is. Natasha isn't just nervous, she's nearly _terrified_ , and that makes Clint scared too. He's spent the last few months thinking of a million different ways this conversation could play out over, and all of the scenarios that started with a freaked-out Natasha ended badly. 

All of them. 

Clint steps aside and jerks his thumb over his shoulder, towards the inside of his apartment. "You coming in, or not?" he asks, because if they’re gonna do this they might as well scream at each other in private.

Natasha doesn't move immediately, instead taking a moment to carefully study Clint's face, trying to determine his motives. Clint's known her for too many years and he isn’t surprised by that, although he can't help but feel a little irritated at the action anyway. Finally she moves forward, gliding past Clint in a few quick steps, and leaving Clint to follow her inside and close the door behind them. 

The smell of coffee had drifted throughout nearly the entire apartment by this point and, in a last-ditch attempt to stall the conversation that Clint knows is coming, he asks, "Do you want a cup of coffee?"

Natasha blinks at him, her way of showing that she's been thrown by the question, but finally nods. "Yes. Thank you. Bl-"

"Black, I know, I've been making you coffee for how long now?" Clint asks, the question purely rhetorical, as he grabs two mugs out of his cabinet. 

Natasha lets out a small huff of laughter and says, "Usually I'm the one making the coffee."

"That's because I'm usually asleep when you break into my apartment," Clint replies. "Thanks for not doing that today, by the way."

Natasha just shrugs one shoulder, a silent "No problem," and the room falls quiet again. Clint's heart is racing in his chest and despite the fact that he can banter with Nat all day he still has no idea how to even start the conversation that needs to happen. If he could just keep putting it off forever he would... but he knows that that isn't an option here. 

He passes one mug over to Natasha and it's _her_ mug, the one that's covered in a collage of ridiculous cat pictures, because Clint had found it during one of his SHIELD ops abroad and brought it back as a joking souvenir for her. How it ended up in his kitchen, instead of hers, he still doesn't know, but she refuses to drink out of anything else. 

He wonders what will happen to the mug if this conversation drives Nat to leave the team entirely. 

Clint takes a large gulp of his own coffee, and tries not to choke as it burns his mouth and throat. In any other situation, on any other day, this would be the point where Natasha would give him that bemused half-smile of hers and ask if he was having problems remembering how cups worked. But there’s no sarcastic comment this time, just Natasha watching him with an expressionless face, drinking her own cup of coffee.

Just as Clint thinks the silence is going to drive him crazy, Natasha asks, “Can I ask you a question?”

Somehow, snarking _You just did_ , doesn’t seem as good of an idea as it usually does. “Yeah, go for it,” Clint says, even though his heart is beating so fast that he can feel it in his goddamn throat. 

“How drunk you were last night?” Natasha asks. That’s all it takes for Clint’s anger to come surging back, and he’s never been as good at hiding his emotions as Nat because she immediately sees the danger signs and backpedals. “I just meant… What you said in those texts. Did you mean that, or were you just drunk?”

Clint wants to interpret that as Natasha asking if Clint only thought he was aromantic because he was too drunk to know better, just to have an excuse to stay angry. He’s not sure how he’s going to get through this conversation if he’s not angry… but he also knows that the conversation won’t go well if he stays spitting mad and irrational the whole time. He may not be the Hulk, but Clint isn’t a pleasant guy to be around when he’s pissed off and taking that anger out on others. 

So instead Clint takes a deep breath and interprets Natasha’s words in a much more forgiving light. “It wasn’t just me being drunk. I meant what I said,” Clint tells her. “I was just too scared to say it when I was sober.”

“Say it to who?” Natasha asks. “Yourself? Anyone? Or… or me in particular?”

It’s not the loud protest that Clint was half-expecting, so he’s going to take this as a good sign. “All of the above?” Clint says.

Natasha nods like she was expecting that response. “You texted me because you thought you were texting Kate,” she says. “Would you have still texted me- or talked to me, or anything- if you were sober?”

Clint exhales harshly, and forces himself to shake his head. “Probably not, no.” He knows what that admittance will do to Natasha, but this conversation is already going to be bad enough without adding lying into the mix.

And Clint is already so, so tired of lying to protect Natasha’s feelings anyway.

Natasha closes her eyes, just for a split second, and her hands tighten their grip on her coffee cup. “Why?” she asks softly. She sounds hurt, and confused, and Clint hates this with every fiber of his being.

“Nat…”

“I need to know, Clint,” she interrupts. “It must have been something I did, and I need to know what that was because I’ve spent the last sixteen hours trying to remember and I can’t think of anything. I need to know why you wouldn’t…” Her voice shakes, just a little, just enough, and she cuts off what she was going to say before it can break entirely. 

“I know I got a little intense about Tony, trying to learn everything I could. And I know I fucked up back in May with questioning him about this identity, but he forgave me almost immediately and apart from that- apart from that I don’t think I handled this too badly,” Natasha continues. “Did you think I’d react differently to you? That I’d react worse?”

Clint’s mouth is dry and he can’t find his voice to answer, to tell her that yes, yes he thought she would react worse than she did with Tony, that even before May he thought she would react badly to this.

Natasha makes a small noise of frustration at Clint’s silence. “What was it? Was it the interfering in your love life? The constant advice, the nagging? Was it the attempts to set you up on dates? What did I do, Clint? Why didn’t you tru-”

She cuts off suddenly, viciously, but Clint knows how that question was going to end. “I trust you. I’ve always trusted you, I always will trust you,” Clint says, his voice firm because Natasha needs to know this. Clint knows that there’s no way he can avoid giving her an explanation, but that explanation is going to hurt her and before he says anything else she needs to know that his trust in her has never wavered.

“Then why?” Natasha repeats. “Please, Clint. I know you have a right to your privacy, but… _why_?”

“Because you did say something,” Clint says. “Years ago, you said… you…”

 _Damnit_ , why is this so hard? Clint’s never been able to forget what Natasha said, not once in the last six years, so why can’t he get the words out now?

He drags a hand over his face and tries a different tactic. “Do you remember when we broke up?”

“Which time?” Natasha tries to joke. Clint gives her a look and she sighs. “The last time?”

Clint nods. Their last breakup was, without a doubt, the worst. A verbal argument turned into a physical fight, and in the end it took four SHIELD agents including Hill and Coulson to pry them apart. Natasha and Clint had both stormed off in separate directions, and Natasha didn’t speak to Clint for a full week.

“Is this about my offer to help you navigate future relationships?” Natasha asks in a small voice. “Because you seemed to appreciate it at the time.”

“I did,” Clint says. He appreciated the help until Tony came out, really, and Clint started second-guessing everything he thought he knew. “But no. This came before that. We had a conversation, remember?”

Natasha, frowning, says, “I was away on an op before that-”

“ _No_ ,” Clint cuts her off. “Before that. A week after the fight, you finally decided you were going to talk to me again. Do you remember that conversation?”

Natasha’s eyes are wide but she doesn’t say anything and it’s Clint’s turn to make a low growl of frustration. “You apologized for giving me the silent treatment, and I apologized for being an ass and setting you off in the first place, and we agreed to never date again but stay friends. And I made a joke- no, not even a joke. It was just a dumb fucking comment. I don’t even know if I wanted you to take it seriously or not. But I said if there was one good thing that came out of that fucking terrible break-up it was that I realized I just didn’t love people right.”

Clint laughs, not because it’s funny because, god, it’s not funny at all, but because he has flown straight past his breaking point and doesn’t know what else to do. Natasha still has that wide-eyed, horrified look on her face but she isn’t saying anything. Clint knew, he fucking _knew_ , that she wouldn’t remember this but it still stings to have it confirmed anyway.

Clint doesn’t want to do this, doesn’t want to repeat her words back to her because this will break her as easily as it broke him, but there’s no way around it. This has been tearing Clint apart, maybe not for the last six years but definitely the last eleven months, and if he doesn’t get it out into the open now he thinks it might kill him. 

“You gave me this look,” Clint says, “and you said, _Don’t be an idiot, Clint. Obviously you love people, it’s just a matter of finding the right person to love- and clearly that wasn’t me. Just don’t take on my romantic baggage and let our disastrous relationship mess with your head like that. Besides, I’ve known_ -” 

Clint’s voice cracks a little and no, fuck, fuck, _fuck_ , he can’t fall apart now! He takes another deep breath and he’s not looking at Natasha, he _can’t_ look at Nat, not if he wants to keep it together long enough to finish talking.

“- _I’ve known real monsters and sociopaths who couldn’t “love people right” and you’re nothing like them._ ”

There's dead silence in the room. Clint finally looks back up at Natasha and the horrified look on her face is gone, replaced with an unreadable stoniness that Clint doesn't know how to interpret. She sets down her coffee cup and Clint knows her too well to miss her slight shift of weight, the adjustment of her stance that signals that she's about to bolt. 

"Don't you fucking dare," he snarls, and he slams his own coffee cup down on the counter so he can reach out and grab her wrist. She breaks his hold easily, and takes a step back, and Clint moves with her immediately. "You wanted to know what you said, what you did? That's what you said. That's what's been eating at me for six goddamn years. You said that only monsters and sociopaths didn't feel love, and every time I got confused by romance or hung up about it all, all I could remember was that. All I could think about was how fucking _broken_ I felt, because I knew something wasn’t right but I couldn’t let myself be _that_. You said it, and you don't get to run from it now."

Natasha is breathing heavily and Clint still isn't sure that he won't lose her because of this, that she won't knock him down and run away or simply slip out of the Tower in the middle of the night, disappearing without telling anyone. 

"Fucking say something," he snaps because he can't tell what she's thinking and that terrifies him. 

"I don't remember saying that," Natasha says quietly. 

"That doesn't mean you-"

"I know that doesn't mean I didn't!" Natasha interrupts, her own voice heated. Clint bristles at the tone and if they start fighting now it's going to be a bad one, but then Natasha continues with, "If you said that I said it, then I said it! I accept that! But I don't remember saying it because I don't remember most of that conversation!"

"Because it wasn't important enough to remember?" Clint asks, sarcasm dripping from every word. 

"No, because I was half-drunk at the time!" Natasha snaps. 

Clint recoils in surprise. "What?"

Natasha sighs and takes a step back towards the counter, so she can lean heavily against it, as if she lost all of her strength when she lost the will to fight about this. "It didn't take me a week to talk to you after we broke up because I hated you. It took that long because I was scared that you hated me, and being that scared about being rejected by another person terrified me. I downed about half a bottle of vodka before going to find you because there if you did hate me there was no way I was going to be able to handle that while sober."

"I... I didn't know that," Clint says, and there's no anger left in his words now, not a single drop of rage left in his entire body. "You didn't act drunk."

"Acting drunk got trained out me long before I met you," Natasha says, and Clint winces at that. 

"So, no, I don't remember saying that exactly," Natasha continues. "But I have no doubt that I did, because it's the exact sort of thing I would say if you had made a comment like that. And because I remember feeling very... worried, I suppose, that I had somehow hurt you during our relationship." Natasha shakes her head. "No, not hurt. _Damaged_. I was afraid that I had damaged you, for a long time after we broke up."

"Damaged-?" Clint swears under his breath. "Jesus Christ, Nat, did you think you abused me while we were dating?"

Natasha looks down at the counter, every line of her body tense. "Our relationship, the romantic portion of it, wasn't healthy. And our friendship has never been normal. I don't- I don't think I ever thought of it as abusive, but I know that I was scared that I had ruined you for other people in some way. I suppose that's why I was so eager to help you with future relationships, to prove to myself that you were still fine." She snorts and mutters, "And instead I just did more harm than good."

"You didn't do more harm than good," Clint says. Natasha gives him an unimpressed look and he sighs. "Okay, well, you did some harm with your meddling, I'm not gonna pretend that you didn't. But I didn't even know that the things you were saying were bad. Neither of us did."

"That doesn't excuse what I said or did," Natasha says. 

"No, it doesn't," Clint agrees, and it hurts to admit that. It hurts to admit that Natasha hurt him, has unintentionally been hurting him for years, and he hates that he’s hurting her now… but there are still more things that he has to say.

“Natasha, listen- This whole aro thing? It happened long before I met you,” Clint says firmly. “I’m not aro-spec because of you, or despite of you, or anything else. But dating you did make me realize that this was something more than just me being bad at relationships, because you have always been the best chance I had at making something work. And if I couldn’t make it work with you then it had to be because there was something fundamentally different about _me_ instead.”

“And then I had to open my mouth and make you think that that difference was that there was something wrong with you, because I told you that if you didn’t love people you were a sociopath!” Natasha snaps. There’s a fine tremor running through her body, a dangerous lapse of control from the assassin, and her grip on the countertop is tight enough to turn her knuckles pure white. “I was so obsessed with making sure that our relationship- that _I_ hadn’t damaged you, that I ended up doing just that anyway! There’s no excusing that!”

“No, but I’m not going to hate you for it!” Clint snaps, because this has never been about hating Natasha. It’s always been about hating the situation, hating what happened, hating that they ended up here, of all places. But Clint can’t hate Nat. She means too much to him for that.

Natasha, however, is understandably skeptical. “Really?” she asks, raising an eyebrow and giving Clint a doubtful look.

“Really. Look, you want the truth here?” Natasha nods. “I hate that this happened. I hate that I’ve spent six years forcing myself into relationships and situations that I don’t know if I actually wanted. And I hate that I can’t figure out if I wanted them or not. I hate that you were the one who made me feel like there was something wrong with me. I hate that you’re always so damn scared of yourself but mostly I hate that I got fucked over by that this time instead of you.

“You fucked up, Nat,” Clint says because she did, so many times over the last six years, in so many different ways. Not just with the horrific comment she made but with the advice she gave, the situations she pushed him into, the constant prying and meddling. “ _You fucked up._ If you were so scared that you had hurt me you should’ve just fucking said so instead of dancing around the issue and pretending that your offer to help me was ever something more than you wanting to soothe your own guilt. You should’ve-”

Clint has to take a deep breath to get his anger under control again, before Natasha mistakenly thinks that it’s directed at her. “You should’ve fucking handled this different. But I also shouldn’t have let you walk over my love life for the last six years, and I should’ve said something eleven months ago when Stark came out and I started questioning things over again instead of diving into another relationship and taking my frustrations out on you. Neither of us are saints here, _especially_ not you. But I hate what you _did_. I don’t hate _you_.”

“You should,” Natasha tries to argue.

“No. You don’t get to make me hate you so you can feel justified in your guilt,” Clint snaps. “You’re my friend, you’re my _family_ , and you‘re the most important goddamn person in my life. And I hate that we ended up here, and that you hurt me and that telling you this hurt you, but _I don’t fucking hate you_. And I need you to understand that because you’re practically all I have left in this fucking world and I will _not_ lose you because of some shitity misunderstanding from half a lifetime ago, do you understand me?”

Natasha’s clenches her jaw and says, “So, what? Now we just hug and move on and pretend that none of this ever happened? Because I can’t do that.”

“And neither can I,” Clint says. It’s going to take a lot longer than six minutes to get the last six years to stop fucking with his head. “For fuck’s sake, Nat, do you think this is easy for me? Here’s a fun fact for you, I just found out what grey-aromantic identities are last night because I’ve been too terrified to actually research anything myself over the last eleven months! I have a label that I don’t even know if I want to use, let alone tell anyone about! And instead of dealing with any of _that_ I’m standing here trying to convince you that you don’t really want to burn this all to the ground, even though this situation really isn’t about you at all.”

Natasha flinches at that. Part of Clint notices and just goes, _Good_. 

“If you want to walk away from everything you’ve built for yourself, well, I guess I can’t stop you,” Clint says. “And you can try to argue that I’d be better off for it, but no one else on this team has my back like you do. No one else survived SHIELD. No one else was at Budapest. No one knows me, knows everything I’ve lost and everything I’ve gained, like you do. If you walk…” Clint swallows harshly. “If you walk, I can’t replace you. And I don’t want to.”

Clint crosses his arms and waits for Natasha’s next move. If she tries to leave again Clint tells himself he’ll let her walk away, but he knows that he would be back down in Tony’s workshop in ten minutes demanding that the genius help him find her. So mostly he’s banking on Natasha not really wanting to give up her entire world, no matter what she may be feeling.

“If I hurt you again, you have to tell me,” Natasha says at last. “And not six years down the road- god, Clint, _six years_? Do you even know what that’s like, finding out that you’ve been hurting someone for that long without even realizing it?” She shakes her head, her red hair a tousled halo around her face. “I can’t do that again. I _won’t_ do that again, I swear to you, but if something happens-”

“I’ll tell you,” Clint says and, because Nat isn’t looking at him, he reaches out and gently tips her chin up so she can see the honesty in his eyes. “Hey, Widow, I’ll tell you next time, okay? I promise I will. I don’t want to let something like this eat away at me again either.”

Natasha nods and, in a move that takes Clint completely by surprise, she steps forward and wraps her arms around him- not as an attack, but as a hug. It takes Clint a second or two to reciprocate, but finally he brings his arms up and wraps them around Natasha as well. Hugs from the Black Widow may not be common, but this also isn’t the first time Clint has been on the receiving end of one and he isn’t surprised when Nat sighs softly and presses closer to him. 

There’s nothing sexual about it, certainly nothing romantic, but it’s comforting nonetheless. It’s been too long since the two of them have had a quiet moment like this, and Clint knows that a large part of that is because he’s been too scared, too angry, too worked up, around Natasha to even think about this kind of casual intimacy. But now that he has it again, _god_ , he almost aches with how much he’s missed this. 

“I don’t think you should talk to me about your relationships anymore,” Natasha says, her voice muffled against Clint’s neck. 

“I don’t think I could even if I wanted to,” Clint admits. “And besides I’m not even sure if I want a relationship right now. There’s, uh… a lot I still have to figure out.”

Natasha nods and pulls away, and Clint knows better than to try to keep her from moving. “You said you had found a label,” Natasha says slowly. “I know… You said you weren’t completely comfortable with it… but can I ask…?”

If it was anyone else asking the answer would be an immediate, resounding _No_ , and that might still be the answer anyway. Despite the conversation they just had, some of Clint’s lingering panic over the prospect of talking to Natasha about this stuff rears up and makes his heart leap into his throat. Clint has to force the panic back down, force himself to calm down, before he makes a rash decision he’ll regret later. 

“You don’t have to-” Natasha begins, but Clint shakes his head. 

“I want to.” Talking to Stark about this stuff is both daunting and embarrassing, and even if Natasha doesn’t have the greatest track record with respecting identities he hopes that she’s learned her lesson enough to at least keep snide comments to herself. “I’m- it’s quoiromantic. That’s the label I found.”

Clint braces himself for the joke but Natasha’s lips just quirk up in a smile and she says, “WTFromantic. Very fitting.”

“I didn’t pick it because of the name,” Clint says, voice a little sharp and warning.

Natasha holds up her hands, gesturing for him to calm down. “No, I know that. I meant, it seems like a good label if you’re confused about where you stand. And from comments you’ve made over the years, I can see how it would fit anyway. I wasn’t trying to be insulting.”

Clint exhales sharply, and laughs a little unsteadily. “Sorry. I think I’m just going to need a little bit of time to stop being so defensive.”

The _around you_ goes unsaid, but Natasha nods in understanding anyway, her eyes a little sad. “Of course,” she says. “If there’s anything I can do…”

“Just don’t try to push me? And I’ll let you know if I need anything else,” Clint says.

Natasha nods again. “Of course.” She drains her coffee, which has to be cold by now, in one gulp and crosses the kitchen to set the mug in the sink. “If it’s the same to you, I’ll leave you alone now. You’re probably exhausted and I… I have some things to think about.”

“Yeah, of course,” Clint says. He watches as Natasha lets herself out of his apartment and sighs, burying his face in one hand. 

That went as well as could be expected, better even. So why does he feel like absolute shit?

“JARVIS, is Tony in the Tower?” Clint asks. 

“Yes, Sir is in the penthouse,” JARVIS replies. “Shall I connect you to him?”

“Please,” Clint says, and a second later Tony’s voice echoes out of the speakers hidden across the apartment, “Clint? Everything okay?”

Tony’s voice is sharp with concern and Clint is so damn comforted by that that he nearly wants to laugh. “Well, I don’t think she’s going to leave the team, so that’s pretty good,” Clint says. 

“Oh thank fucking god,” Tony says, the relief evident in his voice. “And everything else?”

Clint thinks about that one for a second. “I think we’re going to be okay,” he says at last, and finds that he means it.

“Good,” Tony says. “What do you need from me?” It’s not a barbed question, no annoyance in Tony’s tone. Just a sincere inquiry as to how he can help… and if Clint’s being honest, he wasn’t calling just to give Tony a status update. 

“You mind if I bother you for a second night in a row?” Clint asks, trying to sound nonchalant to hide how nervous- and desperate- he is. The conversation with Natasha _did_ go well, all things considered, but despite that Clint still feels fragile, and overwhelmed, and doesn’t particularly want to be alone at the moment. 

“Sure, as long as there’s no drinking this time,” Tony tells him.

“Fair enough,” Clint says. He wants to drink, god does he want to be dealing with this drunk instead of sober, but he gets why Tony wouldn’t want to be put in the same position as the night before. “You wanna order takeout then?”

“I suppose that can be arranged,” Tony says, although Clint half-suspects that JARVIS is already placing an order for them. “You heading up here now then?”

“Already on my way,” Clint says, as he crosses the apartment towards the door. Before he leaves he grabs his cell phone, and makes sure to set an alarm for the following morning and text Kate that he’ll be meeting her then- and this time, he double-checks that the text is going to the right person. 

Maybe he’ll be able to convince Stark to give him a lift out to Brooklyn. After all, he’s going to have someone to see about a dog.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Natasha's comment to Clint is based on something an ex of mine once said to me (essentially "You just think you're aro because our relationship messed with your head"). Though Natasha's comment was quite a bit worse than what I got.
> 
> One day I'll stop basing these characters on my own experiences. Clearly, that day is not today.
> 
> Given that this was supposed to be posted, oh, four months ago, I don't want to make promises about getting another story up any time soon. That being said... I have plans for a much (much, *much*) shorter holiday fic so keep your eyes open for that and your fingers crossed that I can edit it in time for posting!


End file.
